Error attacks are a form of side channel attacks in which an attacker tries to disturb hardware which performs a data processing (e.g. performs a certain software program or a certain application) by means of external effects to change the normal processing flow and provoke a misbehavior of the hardware. The correct operation of hardware, e.g. an electronic circuit, is typically only guaranteed by a manufacturer for certain environmental conditions and operational parameters. For example, an operation of a hardware outside the specified operation voltage, operation temperature and clock frequency or usage of electromagnetic radiation (such as microwaves, light or laser pulses or x-ray radiation) or radioactive radiation may therefore lead to misbehavior and thus for computation errors. Protection against such computation errors is typically important for security relevant electronic circuits, such as processing circuits on chip cards, since in certain cryptographic methods a single erroneous result may be sufficient to extract secret keys which are under normal operation securely stored in hardware and thus to compromise a whole cryptographic system.
In addition to the classification based on the physical attack technique used error attacks as described above are classified into invasive and non-invasive techniques, methods with transient or permanent errors and attacks on stored data of intermediate results or attacks on the control flow.
Approaches to avoid or detect error attacks are desirable.